0000000000906570
AUTHOR
Yuval Burstyn
Are oxygen isotope fractionation factors between calcite and water derived from speleothems systematically biased due to prior calcite precipitation (PCP)?
Abstract The equilibrium oxygen isotope fractionation factor between calcite and water (18αcalcite/H2O) is an important quantity in stable isotope geochemistry and allows in principle to infer temperature variations from carbonate δ18O if carbonate formation occurred in thermodynamic equilibrium. For this reason, many studies intended to determine the value of the oxygen isotope fractionation factor between calcite and water (18αcalcite/H2O) for a wide range of temperatures using modern cave calcite and the corresponding cave drip water or ancient speleothem carbonate and fluid inclusion samples. However, the picture that emerges from all of these studies indicates that speleothem calcite i…
The SISAL database: a global resource to document oxygen and carbon isotope records from speleothems
Stable isotope records from speleothems provide information on past climate changes, most particularly information that can be used to reconstruct past changes in precipitation and atmospheric circulation. These records are increasingly being used to provide “out-of-sample” evaluations of isotope-enabled climate models. SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) is an international working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. The working group aims to provide a comprehensive compilation of speleothem isotope records for climate reconstruction and model evaluation. The SISAL database contains data for individual speleothems, grouped by cave system. Stable isotopes of oxyg…
Speleothems from the Middle East: An Example of Water Limited Environments in the SISAL Database
The Middle East (ME) spans the transition between a temperate Mediterranean climate in the Levant to hyper-arid sub-tropical deserts in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula (AP), with the complex alpine topography in the northeast feeding the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which support life in the Southeastern Fertile Crescent (FC). Climate projections predict severe drying in several parts of the ME in response to global warming, making it important to understand the controls of hydro-climate perturbations in the region. Here we discuss 23 ME speleothem stable oxygen isotope (δ18Occ) records from 16 sites from the SISAL_v1 database (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis database), …